sábado, 23 de julho de 2011

Painter Lucian Freud dies aged 88. The realist painter and one of Britain's most distinguished and highly regarded artists, has died aged 88. His career as an artist spanned almost 50 years. He is particularly known for his paintings of nudes.

Related Stories

Realist painter Lucian Freud, one of Britain's most distinguished and highly regarded artists, has died aged 88.

New York dealer William Acquavella said Freud had died at his London home on Wednesday after an unspecified illness.Freud, a grandson of the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin in 1922 and fled to Britain with his Jewish family in 1933, when he was 10.Freud - particularly known for his paintings of nudes - became a British citizen in 1939.

Boy on a Sofa fetched £1.49m last year, a record price for a work on paper by Freud.

His works have been increasingly sought after at recent auctions and his portrayal of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch sold in 2008 for $33.6m (£20.6m) - a world record for a work by a living artist.'Lived to paint'Mr Acquavella described Freud "as one of the great painters of the 20th Century"."In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world."Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery, said: "The vitality of [Freud's] nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th Century art."His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period."Former Observer art critic William Feaver, who knew Freud for more than 40 years, said Freud was someone who had "restored portraiture to its proper place", by focusing on all types of people, not just successful businessmen and their wives.

Click to play

Lucian Freud muse Sue Tilley talks to BBC Breakfast about her experiences with the artist

"He said everything he did was autobiographical and a self portrait. He was a witty, impulsive artist but generous with it."Mr Feaver said Freud had left several unfinished paintings.He said: "He always liked to keep a couple of paintings on the go in case he dropped off the twig and I know he's done that."Former muse Sue Tilley, who sat for the nude Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, said she had "fantastic experiences" while posing for the portrait."I found out last night on Twitter, bizarrely, and I did start crying," she told BBC Breakfast."I haven't seen him for a long time and he's not really a close friend now but it's a part of my life that's kind of gone."Order of MeritFreud, the son of an architect and older brother of the late broadcaster Clement Freud, went to the Central School of Art, in London and then to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and London's Goldsmiths College. At first he confined himself to drawing, but when he was 17 had a self-portrait accepted for reproduction in the magazine, Horizon.Freud was recognised early on and after a spell in the Merchant Navy in 1942, had his first one-man show in 1944, when he was 21.

After the war he went to France and Greece, and having taken up painting by then, returned to the UK in 1948 to teach for 10 years at the Slade School of Art.

Freud was married twice, first to sculptor Jacob Epstein's daughter, Kitty, the subject of his celebrated Girl With a White Dog. His second wife was the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.Freud's other key works include Naked Girl Asleep and Reflection (self portrait). The Queen and supermodel Kate Moss are among those to have sat for the artist.Freud was a member of the Order of Merit, one of Britain's most prestigious chivalry honours presented to individuals by the Queen for great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature and science.The honour is restricted to 24 members at any one time, plus additional foreign recipients and past recipients include Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Edward Elgar and Mother Teresa.

Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83

Cy Twombly’s “Bacchanalia: Fall (5 Days in November),” from 1977, was part of a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London that placed Twombly paintings with works by Nicolas Poussin.

Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.

The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.

Cy Twombly’s “Bacchanalia: Fall (5 Days in November),” from 1977, was part of a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London that placed Twombly paintings with works by Nicolas Poussin.

Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.

The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.

In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop Art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”

Mr. Twombly’s decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail – scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks – lost much of their power in reproduction.

But Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program and looked to his own muses: often literary ones like Catullus, Rumi, Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with unpopularity.

“I had my freedom and that was nice,” he said in a rare interview, with Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, before a 2008 survey of his career at the Tate Modern.

The critical low point probably came after a 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that was widely panned. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning evehttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1781354626797622246n so, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”

But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Mr. Twombly’s, like that of Joseph Beuys, the new-found attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed. And by the next decade he was highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of him two decades before.

In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, “Fifty Days at Iliam,” based on Alexander Pope’s translation of the “Iliad.” (Mr. Twombly said that he had purposely misspelled “Ilium,” a Latin name for Troy, with an “a,” to refer to Achilles.) That same year, Mr. Twombly’s work passed the million-dollar mark at auction. In 1995 the Menil Collection in Houston opened a new gallery dedicated to his work, designed by Renzo Piano after a plan by Mr. Twombly himself. Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it necessary to include an essay in the Modern’s newsletter at the time of the retrospective, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.”

In the only written statement that Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”

Seguidores

ALL OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS HEREIN, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ARE COPYRIGHTED BY THE artist. NO PART OF THIS SITE, OR ANY OF THE CONTENT CONTAINED HEREIN, MAY BE USED OR REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S).